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“Cinderella” by Iva Morris presents a voluptuous female in a red and purple dress within a stage set with a backdrop sky.
Iva Morris is a multifaceted artist who moves seamlessly between pastels, oils, figures and landscapes in her latest show at Sumner and Dene. Though the show is billed as a “Pastel Landscapes” exhibition, Morris included a half-dozen mural-scale figurative paintings.
For those who may wonder when the ISEA2012 Albuquerque: “Machine Wilderness” shows will be reviewed, please consider this to be the transitional review moving toward the complexity and depth found in contemporary electronic and conceptual art.
Through her work Morris is composing an autobiographical visual record partially inspired by her grandmother’s needlepoint renderings of family and friends. When Morris asked her grandmother why she was never in the family scenes, she replied that she was in all of them but wasn’t visible.
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If you go WHAT: “Pastel Landscapes and Figure Paintings” by Iva Morris WHEN: Through Saturday, Oct. 27. Hours are 10 a.m.- 6 p.m. Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and noon-4 p.m. Sunday WHERE: Sumner and Dene Gallery, 517 W. Central HOW MUCH: Free |
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In her online artist statement Morris quotes Andrew Wyeth: “Art is nothing more than the people that you love and the place where you live.”
Though Morris may want to embrace Wyeth’s simplicity of purpose, she complicates her journey with dramatic and fantastic visual gestures in both her figures and landscapes.
Bubbles and butterflies surround a reclining figure wearing a diaphanous gown in “Mariposa,” Morris’ full-figure portrait of a woman with long blond hair and masquerade eye makeup.
The beautifully rendered painting is composed in what Morris describes as the shallow and graphic space of advertising. Her aim is to create personal billboards recording one woman’s life using paint and canvas. I’d love to see an actual billboard featuring one of Morris’ gorgeously enigmatic figures. On second thought, it probably would cause a lot of accidents.
“Mariposa” by Iva Morris shoehorns a complex full-figured fantasy filled with bubbles and butterflies into the shallow space of an advertising billboard.
One might also want to keep under wraps Morris’ “Cinderella,” a voluptuous figure wearing a red and purple dress while surrounded by key-bearing birds in front of a cloud-filled sky. The figure is playing with keys hanging from a strip of white cloth that loosely hangs between her outstretched hands. As expected from Morris, the painting has the shallow space of a stage set with a backdrop sky.
Given the figure’s smirking countenance, the picture apparently depicts one of Cinderella’s abusive sisters rather than the future princess herself.
Stormy skies dominate several of Morris’ pastel landscapes, placing her firmly in the Hudson River School style of drama-laden vistas.
Her “Outside Espanola” features a gigantic thunderhead floating above the distant horizon. The scene includes a nearby fence line crossing dry land punctuated by far distant rain showers.
One of the joys of being a motorcyclist in New Mexico used to be the ability to ride around isolated storms. Nowadays I seldom see those easily identified sheets of rain falling from discernible cloud formations. Storms seem to be all-consuming now.
“Outside Española” by Iva Morris features a gigantic thunderhead offering the distant possibility of thirst-quenching rain.
In “Sisters” Morris depicts the formation of funnel clouds, with one clear tornado touching down. The overall darkness of the entire sky and the implied violence of the scene certainly illustrate contemporary Southwest weather phenomena.
Peace and quiet are also part of Morris’ repertoire in works like “Sanctuary,” with its gently flowing water and grass-covered shorelines. The pictorial with its contemplative message is a balm for the spirit.
Morris is an enormously talented artist with a broad visual vocabulary. This is a do-not-miss opportunity to witness several aspects of a complex artist’s production.
“Birthday” by Iva Morris is in a show at Sumner and Dene Gallery Downtown.
